Less than a week into the new year and I’m already lagging on the resolutions that were supposed to make me a lean, mean writing machine.  Not lean, not mean (maybe a bit pissy) and the writing machinery is missing a few cogs and gears.

But I have excuses, honest I do.

image via min.com

My writing room renovation isn’t complete.  The new wood flooring, nearly 1,000 feet of it, is down and finished.  I haven’t replaced the desk, yet, so I’m a “homeless” writer, relegated to vacant available space on a sofa, dining room table or patio chair.  The new desks and furnishings aren’t building themselves.  The 1870’s reclaimed barn wood, with a silver patina will look great with the timbers and iron pipe accents.

Taking down Christmas decorations is a chore steeped in misery and bitter tears.  What looks so nice while it’s up takes on dimensions of a circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.  Boxes, stacked in a certain order, containing a specific number of lights, ornaments, and do-dangles, must fit in a closet under the stairs in a Tetris-like exercise designed to pop an aneurism.  In all honesty, this is wifey’s realm.  She decorates, and decorates and then, decorates some more.  On New Year’s Day, or very shortly thereafter, she makes it all disappear, with little help (or what she calls, bothersome interference) from me.

The winter weather is not conducive to butt-in-the-chair writing time.  You’ve all seen the blizzards and white-outs in Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis.  Record high temperatures here in Northern California are simply damn distracting.  Sun, near 70 degree temperatures, lure the easily distracted outside, away from the keyboard.

Puppies need petting and training.  Associated with the warm weather, puppies want to go out for walks – lots of them.  Just when you settle in at the keyboard, “Woof,” which translates roughly to “Get off your human butt and let’s go out and play.”  And, there’s been dog training sessions.  As for the petting, who can say no to this face?

The geospastic forces of the universe are not properly aligned.  There are unexplained forces in the universe blocking words on the page.  If you listen very carefully, a faint whining noise comes from under the spacebar on the keyboard, “Noooo, I don’t wanna, don’t make me.”  There are dark magnetic poltergeists distracting and pulling my attention to football, hockey and DIY home improvement television shows.  Very dark forces, indeed.

Just what did I get accomplished?  In retrospect, I’ve finished the revisions on Hollow Man, my black market organ transplant thriller, gathered comments and reader input on a possible sequel to Little River and dusted off the outline for a new novel on the cartels and illegal immigration.  Finally, the paperback edition of Little River is now in an honest to God bookstore, Face in A Book, in El Dorado Hills, CA, for all the world to see.

All in all, not a bad start to the writing year…let’s all keep it going.